[citation][nom]drlawyer[/nom]After learning (the hard way) that most consumer motherboards - even so called "high end" or "gaming" boards - utilize the Marvel "it's SATA III except that it's really kinda not" controller, I find myself looking for a (cost-effective) alternative. Am I reading this correctly, that the Neutron will feature an on-drive controller? Or is it simply compatible with the LAMD controller if you happen to have a system with one installed?[/citation]
The controller for an SSD controls the NAND chips and lets the SATA controller on the other end of the SATA cable use the SSD. These drive's can't have the SATA controller on-board because the chipset would need to be modified (and perhaps the very SATA interface) to let the drive have the controller. This would also increase latency dramatically and there would be other drawbacks. A comparable situation would be moving the memory controller of a CPU back onto the motherboard instead of on the CPU. Latency would increase greatly.
There would also still be the problem that the SATA ports on the motherboard (or expansion card connected to the motherboard, or any other way of using a SATA bus on a computer) would still need to be interfaced all the way to the CPU without a bad link being in that chain. Theoretically, it would mean that the quality of the SATA controller on the drive would be able to better dictate the throughput of the drive, but it would have larger latencies. If you use the Intel or AMD SATA3 controllers instead of any poor Marvell controllers, throughput is not a problem like it is on some of those Marvell controllers.
Also, the Marvell controllers are truly SATA3, they simply don't have throughput that can match the Intel or even the AMD SATA3 controllers. SATA3 is a specification and the Marvel controllers must abide by it to work with SATA3 devices. Saying that they aren't quite SATA3 is like saying the Celeron G440 isn't quite a CPU just because it has a mere ~1/3 of the dual threaded performance thatthe next Celeron up, the Celeron G530, has.
Point is, the controllers on SSDs are not SATA controllers, they are NAND flash memory controllers. They are more comparable to the memory controller on the LGA 775 boards and similar arrangements. Sure, they're a memory controller, but since the chip with the controller is separate from the CPU, there needs to be yet another connection from the CPU to that north bridge that has the memory controller. In this case, that would be the CPU's side of the FSB and the SATA controller is akin to it in this comparison. Sure, it's doable, but it would require a reworking of SATA and although it could mean that each drive has more consistent throughput a little more regardless of what SATA port that you put it in so long as the port is SATA3 compatible, but at the cost of latency, increased complexity of implementation, and all the work that would need to go into implementing it.